How to Research Affect Ethnographically

by Jonah S. Rubin

How are anthropologists and other ethnographers to study the seemingly ephemeral and slippery category of affect? This was the question taken up by the three presenters and three discussants at a panel entitled: “Researching Affect / Affecting Research: Empathy and Imagination in Anthropological Methods.”

Elizabeth Anne Davis considered the question in the context of her own experiences trying to conduct visual ethnography with the Campaign for Missing Persons in Cyprus (CMP). Despite the frequent presence of cameras at CMP-sponsored exhumations, Dr. Davis was denied permission to film interviews with the forensic team and relatives of the disappeared. Out of this fraught experience, Dr. Davis was able to describe the creation of a new subgenre, whereby the CMP values the indexical evidentiary power of bones rather that the iconic confessional testimony of victims. Discussing the paper, William Mazzarella pointed out that even the rhetoric of transparency that the CMP cultivates produces its own opacities, evoking the idea that there is always more to be revealed. Dr. Mazzarella asked the audience to consider the process by which bones acquire meanings in affective interactions with humans and media technologies.

Moving away from the visual, Lila Allen Gray examined the ways affect is rendered audible in ethnographic practice. Through an examination of Fado music in Lisbon, Portugal, Dr. Gray demonstrated the ways subtleties of voice and music – which are difficult to capture in writing or musical notation – carry rich meanings that can enhance the practice of ethnography. These learned and embodied forms of listening, Dr. Gray argues, become a conduit for emotional engagement. Such engagement can occur in the ephemeral moment of a song just as much as the fetishized concrete object, like the worn down record. Discussing the paper, Valentina Napolitano called for special attention to the pedagogies that enable these sorts of listening. Dr. Napolitano also emphasized the importance of developing new strategies for writing with care, as Dr. Gray had done, cultivating the politics of representation capable of exploring its own hauntings.

Yael Navaro-Yashin examined the affectively charged solidarity protests in Turkey following the assassination of the Armenian journalist Hrant Dink in 2007. Dr. Yashin focused on the cultivation of vijdan amongst the protesters, a Turkish notion roughly translated as an inner, individual sense of ethics, a judgment of the heart that promotes empathy and solidarity. Dr. Navaro-Yashin traced the ways vijdan promoted critiques of the state, calling into question the official narrative of the 1915 genocide, while simultaneously mobilizing a public against the state’s current treatment of Armenians. Ultimately, however, Dr. Yashin warns against idealizing vijdan. Affect, she points out, is unstable, especially when its basis is a public who must see the other as somehow like themselves, rather than embracing their difference. Discussing the paper, Diane Nelson argued for renewed attention to the performative dimensions in public displays of affect. Beyond focusing on the limitations of such public performances of affect, Dr. Nelson urged the audience to consider the ways even forced or feigned performances of affect produce new subjectivities and sensibilities.

Taken together, the panelists and discussants of this panel represent an innovative set of techniques for the ethnographic study of affect. The panelists call upon researchers to be particularly attentive to their own experiences of affect, both in how they share in the emotional responses of their informants and in how they differ from their interlocutors. These interventions remind us that, as anthropologists, we must be mindful not only of what goes on in the field, but also in how these events’ circulate in mass media, public gatherings, and in our own writings.

Jonah S Rubin is a doctoral candidate in anthropology at the University of Chicago. His research focuses on the relationship between remembering, forensic practices, and democratic politics in contemporary exhumations of dead bodies from the Spanish Civil War and ensuing Franco dictatorship.

Comments

Posted By
Mark S. Dolson

Sadly, I think the author of this short piece makes (or seems to make) a very common mistake in conflating affect with emotion.

A bit from my own dissertation which clarifies this distinction:

Following Massumi (1995), I understand affect as an inherently ironic corporeal or physiological response to a certain experience. It is not to be confused with emotion or feeling in that the former is a social display of feeling, which is personal and biographical. Affect, then, is a non-conscious experience of intensity; it is a moment of unformed and unstructured potential. It cannot be fully realized and articulated in language, because affect is always prior to and/or outside consciousness. Affect is the modality of preparing the body for action in a given circumstance by adding a quantitative dimension of intensity to the quality of experience (Shouse 2012).

Posted By
Darren Byler

December 19th

As the discussant on this panel William Mazzarella has argued convincingly in his 2009 essay “Affect: What is it good for?” (http://anthropology.uchicago.edu/docs/mazz_affect.pdf) there is a great amount of slippage between emotion and affect. To Mazzarella’s thinking, affect is neither completely external to discursive/emotive mediation nor simply its effect (299).

What is more important to him though is the way “any social project that is not imposed through force alone must be affective in order to be effective” (299). An “effective” social movement must draw our “desire:” “a movement across the gap between affect and articulation” (299).

It seems to me that this gap (between the affective and emotive) is what Jonah, and the panel he profiles here, is getting at.

Posted By
Jonah S Rubin

December 19th

While I certainly agree that affect and emotion should not be conflated, Im not so sure how useful it is to constrict our definitions of affect at the outset to any single theoretical framework (Not that this is the forum for it, but my own research has led me to think about affect in ways that move beyond a neuro/Deleuzian-inspired approach, but that is the subject for another time). But to return to your question: this panel set out to talk about methods for studying affect and, like all good ethnography, demonstrated how the study of affect in concrete socio-cultural practices speaks towards a very rich and complex (and yes, at times underdefined) body of work.

I believe the power of this panel lies precisely in the ways that it opens up new possibilities for the study of affect. One problem with at the outset assuming a definition of affect as pre-linguistic and non-conscious phenomenon is that it runs the risk of prematurely foreclosing methodological possibilities. To wit, the panel implied that circumscribing affect analytically raised troubling questions for the anthropologist - namely, how to go about designing a research program for questions of affect. Personally, I find Ruth Leys critique quite compelling when she argues that: it is a confusion on … Massumis part to think that because such actions usually go on automatically, below the threshold of consciousness, it is necessary to break with the whole idea of intentionality and to assume that they can only be explained in corporeal terms. But even if we do ultimately see our data leading us back towards a Massumi or Connolly inspired definition of affect, we will at the very least be far more aware of the ways affect manifests in concrete social practice. Here, I think Darren Byler raised the key quote already from Mazzarella: any social project that is not imposed through force alone must be affective in order to be effective”

Dr. Navarro-Yashin and Dr. Grays presentations highlighted compelling strategies for studying the ways that affective intensities congeal and at times (though not always) crystalize into emotional responses to a journalists death and to music respectively. (Although, perhaps I could have been clearer in describing Vijdan as something more than just an emotional response). Dr. Davis presented a different case in which an understanding of affective processes illustrated why constative statements about dead bodies becomes a compelling ethical claim. One takeaway from these case studies: even if we want to rely on Massumis particular rendering of the affect/emotion distinction in our analytic vocabulary, as so often happens with good ethnography, we find that the distinction is much more muddled, complicated, and nuanced in the discourse and actions of our informants and interlocutors.

Posted By
Michal Ran-Rubin

December 19th

Really enjoying this conversation. However, I cant help but feel that one thing that might be overlooked in the commentary is that - for all of @jonahrubins own effort to provide original and analytic reviews of contemporary anthropological engagements - his post here is ultimately an overview of other scholars research and presentations. In other words, attributions to the authors analytic framework feel somewhat misplaced; although this particular author might certainly publish an analytic framework in this blog or some other publication in the future, he has not done so here. Rather, he has reported on the work -- the very interesting and in my opinion suggestive work! -- being done in the field of affect. Because this work is, by its very nature, still a work-in-progress, there certainly are moments of slipperiness. But this, I would suggest, is something interesting to note and consider with respect to the body of literature at hand. That is, the slipperiness of the topic should be a starting point for reflection, not a foreclosure.